Every so often, a perfect storm of work, personal commitments and an occasional Ken Burns documentary keep me from posting here. Usually it’s just several days but in this case it’s been over two weeks. So forgive me if I post a bit more frequently over the next few days to catch up…

Besides not writing or podcasting I pretty much stopped my blog reading. As I returned to Google Reader last week, I had the maximum 1,000+ posts on each of my subscription categories. So I simply pressed the “Mark all as read” button on most categories except for wine blogs.

In my perusal of the past several days, a few posts stood out. But none of these got me thinking more about wine blogging than Jeff’s post over at Good Grape on how 98% of Wine Bloggers Are Hacks. When I saw Ryan’s post today asking the difference between amateur and professional wine writers, I started to think about my credentials, or lack thereof, for what I do here.

Jeff’s post highlights veteran wine writer Matt Kramer’s piece about how 10,000 hours of training is the minimum to attain expert status in any field. Said another way, that’s 3 hours a day for 10 years. It’s been 9,458 days since I turned 21 back in the early days of the first Reagan Administration. To be fair, my wine drinking started three years earlier due to the drinking age in New York being 18 at the time but I really didn’t get into wine until I transfered to a university in northern California in 1980. If I assume that I spent an hour each day studying wine since then, I’m nearly at that 10,000 hour mark now. But my daily consumption of wine didn’t really begin until the mid-80’s and tasting wine is not the same as reading about wine.

So I’m still very much a hack by this definition.

Ryan’s post this morning asked when a blogger crosses the threshold from amateur to professional status? Since by definition an amateur does not get paid for doing a particular task this seems like an easy question. But in this age of affiliate marketing and sponsorship most wine bloggers can earn some sort of income from blogging. But this is not yet enough to earn a living for any wine blogger I know so I guess most of us are still amateur wine writers (or critics, if you like).

But I don’t think this matters very much as wine bloggers are starting to be taken seriously by consumers. Expert or professional status might have been the hurdle for wine writers in the print era but in today’s low-cost, online personal publishing era this barrier has evaporated.

Now seems like the right time to put on the table how this system might work in practice. After thinking about this some and considering what Ryan wrote the other day, I humbly propose we wine bloggers adopt the following rating scales:

We can discuss the merits of adding half-stars to this mix once I get a read on the community’s reaction to this proposal. In the meantime, vote on what our icons should be below (aggregator/email readers might have to click back to the site to vote):

{democracy:4}

Thanks to everyone for their thoughts on this modest proposal. I believe we are making some progress here.

El Jefe laid me bare in his post early this morning (insomnia?) with his poetic argument regarding scores. Let me be clear here, the score is the exclamation point on a bit of prose on the wine in question. Sure, I’m a bit clinical and detached in my reviews sometimes but I do have some passion to spare that Spock might not express. I’ll work on expressing this a bit more.

But I stil think the 5-star (or glass/bottle/cork/bung/unicorn) system is the way for us wine bloggers to go…

Given the passion around the 100-point system, I am not going to suggest this as the wine blogger standard. Neither will I propose either the Vinography 10 point or UC Davis 20-point systems. Because, as Ryan said a while back, shouldn’t the web (and wine bloggers) be different?

What makes the most sense to me is the 5-star systems adopted by most of the Wine 2.0 tasting notes sites and fully supported in the hReview standard.

Hear me out here… first, the scale is easy to understand and implement. It can also be used by readers to rate the same wines and the tasting notes sites can more easily extrapolate a composite score. I also think it is imprecise enough for more participants which is the problem with the 100-point system; it’s exclusiveness to just us uber wine geeks.

So I’m going to propose that wine bloggers rally around the 5-star system. I think the addition of 1/2 points will allow plenty of granularity and overlay all the other systems well enough for widespread adoption.

So who’s with me?

Over the next few days I will be posting some reviews on both Snooth and Winelog that will be reposted automatically here. They are the first two sites to implement an easy way for me to post once and then pull into my blog with no effort on my part. I’m hoping other sites follow suit, as well.

And, for the time-being, I will also post my 100-point score for those who like that system along with the new 5-star scale which at some point in the future will be the only scale I will use to rate wines.

I knew it wouldn’t take long for the “why do you blog” meme to come my way and Gabriella from Catavino did just that 4 days ago. So I thought about it for a while and have come up with a few reasons:

1) I want to share my passion for wine: This is really the heart of the matter; I love wine and want others to discover it, too. I hope what I do here will get more people into wine.

2) I want to grow & learn: The podcast and blog have compelled me to try new wines I would not have otherwise. This has opened up an entirely new wine world to me. Each week I look for new wines to try and not the big jugs of plonk.

3) Wine blogging & podcasting is cool: OK, so this was one of the reasons back in 2004 when I got started. Now it’s just nerdy but I don’t care 😉

4) I like the gigs: Kinda like a musician, this blog has provided me with employment marketing the beverage I love. How cool is that?

5) Because I can: I wish this didn’t sound so egotistical but the tools to share my thoughts about wine are well within the reach of tech geeks like me. I hope more folks with similar passions and technical chops follow, although it’s really pretty easy these days…

I hope I’ve shed some more light on why I do what I do and now will tag a few others in the wine blogosphere and ask the same question: Why do you blog?

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About Me

Tim Elliott is a marketer, blogger and podcaster based in the Twin Cities. He founded Winecast in 2004 to share his passion for wine online. Tim has also written for Minneapolis City Pages, Vineyard & Winery Management Magazine and Honest Cooking.